Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

Common sense is as rare as genius.

Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?

The multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health.

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.

All necessary truth is its own evidence.

Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.

The forest is my loyal friend_x000D_ _x000D_ A Delphic shrine to me.

The world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day.

Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve anyone; it must husband its resources to live. But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.

Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.

For, the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought.

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.